NASA, Navy practice capsule recovery

Monday, August 19, 20130
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NORFOLK, VA. — During the glory days of the U.S. space
program in the 1960s and ‘70s, astronauts returning to Earth splashed down at
sea in their capsules and were picked up by the Navy in a triumphant moment
that made for stirring TV. Now, NASA and the Navy are training again for the
first such recovery in a generation.
On Thursday, they completed several days of tests, practicing the retrieval
of an unmanned mock-up of the Orion capsule that the U.S. hopes to send someday
to an asteroid and Mars.
Navy divers and the crew of the USS Arlington carried out the exercise in
the calm waters of the Elizabeth River at a Naval Station Norfolk pier.
In a statement, Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of Navy’s U.S. Fleet Forces
Command, welcomed the chance to take part again in recovering NASA astronauts
“just as we did nearly a half-century ago in support of America’s quest to put
a man on the moon.”
From 1961 to 1975, teams of Navy ships tracked and recovered Mercury, Gemini
and Apollo spacecraft after they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed
down.
Typically, frogmen would swim up to the pitching, bobbing spacecraft and
help the astronauts out. Then helicopters would hoist the men and their capsule
and fly them to a waiting aircraft carrier. In a few instances, the astronauts
would remain inside the capsule while a crane lifted it aboard a ship.
After Apollo ended, U.S. astronauts began flying the space shuttle, which
returns to Earth on a landing strip like an airplane. With the end of that
program in 2011, astronauts began hitching rides aboard Russia’s Soyuz capsule,
which parachutes to a landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Now, with Orion still under development, the Defense Department and NASA have
to dust off their old recovery playbook and update it to achieve something they
haven’t done since 1975.
“The test we’re seeing today is really the first time that we’ve worked
together with DOD to recover a capsule, really since that mission. So it’s a
pretty historic start to this program that we’re doing,” said Scott Wilson,
NASA’s manager of production operations for the Orion program.